How to Promote and Tweet Live Events on Twitter

Twitter offers you one more promotional tool in your marketing toolbox. If you already work with newspapers, radio and TV stations, and other media outlets, you’re more than ready to tackle Twitter to promote your events.

Use Eventbrite to manage your event. Eventbrite is one of the better systems to manage events, sell tickets, and create a Web site for your event information. You can promote the event through Twitter, Facebook, and other social tools. The event attendees can also publish the fact that they are attending your event. Eventbrite also gives you seamless access to Facebook and LinkedIn to publish your event.

Put shared items on your site and allow others to do the same. Share pictures and videos from last year’s convention and ask others to post their own pictures and videos from the event. Offer buttons on your site to make it easy for others to share items through e-mail and by embedding them on their blogs.

Upload your videos to YouTube, Vimeo, and other video-sharing sites. Create a publication schedule. Instead of uploading all your videos at the same time, trickle them out every week or two so that you can build anticipation. Send out links to the videos through Twitter, your blog, your e-mail newsletter, and anything else you can find.

Encourage people to follow you, and send out an occasional reminder tweet that you’re going to be live tweeting and live blogging during the event. Encourage the attendees to tweet during the event, too. Remind everyone about the use of a preselected hashtag, to make it easy to follow all tweets about the event. With the help of Eventbrite, you can also send mass e-mails to the attendees with hashtag and tweeting information.

Live tweeting is basically just tweeting while you’re at an event or game, or even just watching TV and tweeting about what you see, hear, and think.

Be sure to use hashtags so that people who are monitoring those topics can easily find your tweets about the event. Your hashtags also remind other twitterers to use the same keywords when they talk about the event.

Live tweets related to the Northwest Indiana Tweetup #NWITweetup.

The weird tag #NWITweetup is short for Northwest Indiana Tweetup. Spelling out the entire hashtag — #NorthwestIndianaTweetup — would take up 23 characters, too much space in a single tweet. So, the organizers of the convention established #NWITweetup as the hashtag to use when tweeting about the event.

Establish what hashtags you plan to use before these events. Then communicate those hashtags to the attendees and online attendees so that everyone uses the same tags, thus avoiding any confusion. If the organizers are monitoring #NWITweetup, but a few people are using #northwesttweet, the event’s Twitter stream will miss the #northwesttweet tweets.